Dealing With Infertility With My Husband Taught Me That Love Is Always Enough

1October 15, 2018By Dang

I got married 10 years ago to a really wonderful man. Fortunately, my wonderful man is not a cliché. A few months before we got married, I stopped taking contraceptive pills or bothering with trying not to get to pregnant. I really wanted a baby and didn’t care if the church would ask for a pregnancy test. After a few months of losing the pill and not getting pregnant, I knew something was wrong. Getting pregnant for nitwits in the past had been easy, unplanned, emotionally draining but easy. I started asking for forgiveness from the highest of powers and prayed every day, well not every day and hoped for the best. Nothing Happened.

Charting ovulation and fertile days became an obsession maybe 6months after the wedding. My husband was a good sport so he participated in the craziness. Still nothing! The side eyeing from colleagues started, shifting slowing from side eye to general comments of ” abi e don enter”, ”you look tired, God is your strength o”!

The comments worked on my feeble mind and drove me into a deep depression barely 7 months in. Our general doctor decided that we conduct a series of test to rule out medical issues. My husband willing gave the specimens and we laughed through the process. It was funny! The results for him weren’t as funny though! Mine came out clean but I learned a new medical term- Azoospermia! How???? Wharrisdat??? Google became my friend! I read up. Meanwhile, my husband gave up after a few trips to fertility clinics and started preaching God’s healing and miracles. He’s always been churchy but everything went up a notch from there! Imagine how I felt. Just Imagine! I lost my mind.

So for several years, I did nothing to seek help for us and he was un-bothered. I became resentful towards him. Nothing he did to make me happy made me happy. I sunk deep into myself and fed my need literally with junk food. Food became my source of fleeting pleasure. I gained a considerable amount of weight and didn’t care that I looked like I swallowed myself. Meanwhile, money became really tight because my husband decided to leave his job to start a business.

The business boomed for maybe 2 years then crashed after a group of guys convinced him to venture into an aspect of the business that ended up being a scam. We lost all our savings and incurred debts of about 20 million. I died! Resurrected! Died again! I became the sole breadwinner with no dream of ever going for IVF. I checked out emotionally to cope with both losses. No child. No money. I never really ”gelled” with the in-laws and they became a source of extra pain, though my husband looped them in on the fertility issues immediately we knew. No surprise there but that’s a story for another day.

His past antagonism( prayer is the key mentality) to my need for children drove us apart. I blamed him for not trying with me to fight the disease even though I knew he did not choose to have defective cells. Gradually, there was a tear between us, a tear that grew wider every year we lived without children. It was almost as if the world became a sheet of paper and we were on opposite halves of it, falling apart from each other as if it was a given that our stories would continue on separate sheets, in spite of the deep love we shared. ”Divorce was inevitable,” I thought.

The more I thought about divorce the more I wanted it. Little nuisances became gigantic issues. Pee on the toilet seat made me scream and cry for days. In my mind, he was the source of my pain and I needed to distribute that pain. I did not care that he was in pain too. Dealing with being the active provider to not being able to provide and knowing he could not get me pregnant. He internalised a lot of his pain and that infuriated me too. He became mindful of everything. If we needed to send cash to his parents instead of saying how much they needed he’ll ask me to send what I could afford.

That made me so mad because I wanted him to know it was okay for me to hold us down. It felt like the confident man who insisted on me getting a decent job immediately after NYSC and didn’t worry that I made almost as much as he did and celebrated my strength suddenly disappeared. He became bare, weak, almost empty and that scared me more than the genetic flaw/ lack of money. I moved to a different bedroom and we lived like roommates for a while until I started thinking that maybe I wasn’t being a good friend to my best friend after I heard him crying and praying that God should bless his wife and give her the strength to endure through the pain in our finances and marriage. I am tearing up! Please forgive any typo hereon.

My husband was my rock when his family advised against our marriage talking about ”she is from the wrong tribe” He worked through my emotional issues with me when I first met him and was generally there the way no other human had been for me. He didn’t bail like most guys I dated when I told him I had had a really tough childhood courtesy poverty and an abusive mother. Instead, he reminded me to be grateful that I made it out of that neighbourhood. He provided friendship, support, loyalty, assurance and everything in between. He was and is still the only friend I have. The thought of leaving him because he couldn’t impregnate me made me feel like I betrayed his trust/ loyalty and I hated myself for putting him through more pain than he deserved.

We talked and decided we loved each other too much to separate. Family, colleagues, world people, and friends can spin our gist anyway they want but we have decided that children or no children we will live until we die. We have had 2 failed IVFs since we found peace again but we are still living. Though my husband is not a talker of feelings, I know he is happy. We are slowly making better choices with money since his business recovered and have paid more than half of what we owe. We are not rich but I am happy. Sometimes, love is enough!

One comment on “Dealing With Infertility With My Husband Taught Me That Love Is Always Enough”

This kind of story should be told more often. The different journeys in marriage and how it is possible to stay strong even though we do not get our heart desires. I smiled at the end because it is reassuring to know that whatever ills we go through, we can still be happy if we try.